If you are Wondering what the future of manufacturing will look like, all you need to do is visit the 4th floor of a brick building in London’s Camden district. There, in the Biosafety Level 2 lab obtained from the retooling of an open-plan office half, chemists and biologists in goggles and white coats are busily operating bulky machinery and analyze the contents of reactors and tanks filled with thick yellow saliva. On the other side of the lab’s thick glass partitions, employees wearing sports hoodies and eating from Itsu lunchboxes confirm that we’re still inside the headquarters of a tech startup in London. Its name is FabricNano.
Launched in 2018 with the support of Entrepreneur First, the company has set its sights on transforming the production of petrochemical- and fermented-derived materials — chief among them: plastics — by taking advantage of biological components. In other words, if FabricNano did it his way, the companies that make the plastic would get rid of the oil and use protein instead.
Grant Aarons, the company’s co-founder and CEO, explains: “The major chemical companies, some of which are our customers, want to produce bioplastics at par cost. with things like PET plastic. “And if you’re using a bio-based plastic, it’s more biodegradable.”
The process of creating products and ingredients by exploiting enzymes (proteins that speed up chemical reactions) is well known: High-fructose corn syrup is common in Chinese foods. Ky is created by mixing cornstarch with a protein trio. “It looks like an assembly line: like, you just take your chemical inputs, your raw materials. You’re putting it into the enzyme, handing it over to the next person and creating a cutting-edge product,” said FabricNano vice president of operations, Eliza Eddison. “We can’t help but see it as Henry Ford’s assembly line.”
But when it comes to the production of more complex materials like plastic, the production of bio feng shui is no more. Most of the proteins used to trigger these reactions are destroyed or degraded in the process, making the production of substances at scale too expensive. By solving that problem, FabricNano hopes to jumpstart the industry and make it competitive. The secret, says Aarons, is finding the right kind of support to bind the proteins. “If you put them on a physical surface, you change the shape of the protein,” he explains. “So it changes and it doesn’t work anymore.”
FabricNano’s idea is to bind proteins to lab-made strands of DNA, a material that has never been seriously tested in the industry. The team — which at the time still included co-founder Ferdinando Randisi, who had studied DNA physiology theory at Oxford University — discovered that, indeed, when bound to the DNA scaffold, the proteins are not damaged, allowing them to continue working for much longer, making bio-feng shui production cheaper.
“The proteins don’t get damaged when they’re on the DNA,” says Aarons. The company tried to significantly reduce the cost of producing DNA – but eventually they realized that relying on DNA would always be too expensive for industrial-scale production. Ultimately, however, FabricNano found a way to stitch the intuition that underpins its DNA-based work into a method that has the same benefits, but doesn’t require the use of DNA.
“We were able to break away from DNA and still keep this innovation for this benefit,” says Aarons. “It’s the same principle, but with a different backing.” Exactly how this system works FabricNano won’t say, as the relevant patent applications are yet to be finalized. But chemical, pharmaceutical and engineering companies – including chemical giant Sumitomo Chemical America – have already begun collaborating with FabricNano. “We envision working on an industrial scale within three years,” says Eddison.
On November 2, 2022, FabricNano CEO and Co-Founder Grant Aarons will speak at WIRED Impact, Europe’s premier one-day event that examines the rapidly changing world of sustainability and ESG. Learn more and book your tickets here.
This article appears in the November/December 2022 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
